Special Report

The Target

Everyone who laid eyes on Malala Yousafzai knew the Pakistani schoolgirl was something special. When her mountain town of Mingora, in the Swat Valley, fell under Taliban rule, her courage made her a powerful symbol. And now, after last fall’s near-fatal attempt to silence the 15-year-old, she is more dangerous to Pakistan’s status quo than ever before. Marie Brenner learns how the media handed a megaphone to a kid who wanted more from her country.

SHINING YOUNG LADY Malala Yousafzai at 13, at her father’s school in Mingora, in the Swat Valley.

One day in November 2007, on an editing console in the Dawn television news bureau in Peshawar, Pakistan, the bright brown eyes of a young girl popped from the computer screen. Just three hours to the northeast, in the Swat Valley, the mountain town of Mingora was under siege. Walking by the desk of the bureau chief, a reporter named Syed Irfan Ashraf stopped to take a look at the edit, which was being translated into English for that night’s news, and heard the girl’s voice. “I’m very frightened,” she said crisply. “Earlier, the situation was quite peaceful in Swat, but now it has worsened. Nowadays explosions are increasing We can’t sleep. Our siblings are terrified, and we cannot come to school.” She spoke an Urdu of startling refinement for a rural child. “Who is that girl?,” Ashraf asked the bureau chief. The answer came in Pashto, the local language: “Takra jenai,” which means “a shining young lady.” He added, “I think her name is Malala.”

The bureau chief had driven to Mingora to interview a local activist, the owner of the Khushal Girls High School & College. On the roads, Taliban soldiers in black turbans pulled drivers out of cars at checkpoints, searching for DVDs, alcohol, and anything else in violation of Shari’a, or strict Islamic law. In a lane near the market, a low wall protected the two-story private school. Inside, the bureau chief visited a fourth-grade class, where several girls shot up their hands when asked if they wanted to be interviewed. Seeing girls speak out in public was very unusual, even in the Swat Valley, a cultivated, 3,500-square-mile Shangri-la with 1.5 million inhabitants. That night, the brown-eyed girl’s sound bite led the news.

Later that evening the bureau chief ran into the school’s owner, Ziauddin Yousafzai, who said, “The girl who spoke on your broadcast. That Malala is my daughter.” The highly educated Yousafzai clearly understood that in the rigid class system of Pakistan he was an invisible member of the rural underclass, unseen by the elite of Lahore and Karachi. For his family, a moment on national news was huge. Like his daughter, Ziauddin spoke excellent English. Ashraf, who had been a professor at the University of Peshawar, could not get the image of Malala’s piercing gaze out of his mind. “She was an ordinary girl, but on-camera extraordinary,” he said. His beat at Dawn television included covering the bombings that were devastating remote villages all through Swat, and he determined to meet Malala and her father the next time he was on assignment in Mingora.

Last autumn, I contacted Ashraf at a computer lab in Carbondale, Illinois, where he is studying for a doctorate in media studies at Southern Illinois University. On October 9, he had seen in a news flash the horrifying image of Malala Yousafzai lying bandaged on a stretcher, after having been shot by an unknown extremist on her school bus. For the next three days, Ashraf did not leave his cubicle as the world grieved for this teenager who had stood up to the Taliban. Then he wrote an anguished column in Dawn, Pakistan’s most widely read English-language newspaper, which seemed like a profound mea culpa. Ashraf was savage regarding his role in Malala’s tragedy. “Hype is created with the help of the media while the people wait for the dénouement,” he wrote. He decried “the media’s role in dragging bright young people into dirty wars with horrible consequences for the innocent.” On the telephone he told me, “I was in shock. I could not call anyone.” He described his mute agony watching the TV coverage. “It is criminal what I did,” he said in an apoplectic tone. “I lured in a child of 11.”

Ashraf had watched the news as Malala was later rushed to a hospital in Birmingham, England, where army trauma victims are treated. She was mysteriously separated from her family for 10 days. Many wondered why no relative had been allowed to travel with her. In Pakistan, thousands held candlelight vigils and carried posters that read: we are all malala. Before she was flown to Birmingham, General Ashfaq Kayani, the Pakistan Army chief and former head of the all-powerful Inter-services Intelligence agency (ISI), had gone to the hospital in Peshawar where she struggled for life on a ventilator. The question arose: Why would the most powerful man in Pakistan’s military rush to the provincial capital? Other girls had been assaulted, and the government had hardly reacted.

A country of conspiracy theorists, Pakistan has a long history of Kabuki theater masking the ISI’s and the army’s possible involvement in silencing anyone who attempts to expose the military’s links with extremists. At least 51 journalists have been killed there since 1992.

The attack on Malala exposed not only the dark side of an army unable to provide security but also the abysmal quality of education in Pakistan. Only 2.3 percent of its gross domestic product is allocated to education. Pakistan spends seven times more on its military. According to a recent U.N. study, 5.1 million children are out of school—the second-highest number in the world—and two-thirds of them are female.

“We have a national lie. Why do we have to tell the truth to the world?” says Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United States. “The national lie is that the Swat Valley has been liberated from the bad Taliban. Young Malala and her father mess up that narrative.”

Suddenly a 15-year-old who traded copies of The Twilight Saga with her friends was being talked about as a possible future prime minister, if she could just recover from the bullet wound she had sustained while sitting on her school bus after taking an exam on the Holy Koran.

I told Ashraf I wanted to understand how a girl from a remote village had become a cosmic force for change as well as a focus for a number of complex agendas. He said, “We had to get the story out. No one was paying attention to what was happening in Mingora. We took a very brave 11-year-old and created her to get the attention of the world. We made her a commodity. Then she and her father had to step into the roles we gave them.” At first I thought he must be exaggerating.

The Gifted Child

The capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, Peshawar in 2007 was a boomtown for local journalists. At the Pearl Continental hotel, reporters jockeyed for the services of a freelance professor or writer who might want to earn $200 a day to guide them safely into the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), a poor, mountainous region along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, and long a refuge for the Taliban and other jihadists from around the world. Editors who had interviewed Osama bin Laden a decade earlier could command $500 for a three-hour session with a reporter from the West. In 2006, Dawn had begun hiring for the launch of its national TV channel in an effort to grab a market share of Pakistan’s recently deregulated airwaves. The explosion of cable networks set off a hiring frenzy for instant experts who could do a decent two-minute stand-up on the terrorist chiefs, the al-Qaeda-related Haqqani network, and the dozens of Taliban groups that passed between Afghanistan and Pakistan. To interview the Taliban commanders and tribal chiefs, foreign reporters darkened their hair, grew beards, and went with a Pashtun fixer who could use his contacts to ensure their safety.

You entered another world when you drove from Peshawar into the mountains. no foreigners allowed past this point, warned signs along the entrances to FATA. Pakistan’s history of intrigue, coups, and assassinations had long paralyzed its dealings with the frontier.

In the lower Swat Valley was the town of Mingora, a remote getaway for much of Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. Many of Pakistan’s most popular Pashtun singers, dancers, and musicians came from the area, and in summer, tourists from around the world would arrive in Mingora for its Sufi music and dance festivals. The area was close to a UNESCO site of ancient Gandhara Buddhist art and ruins. In recent years, however, the Taliban had changed all that; the Pearl Continental hotel was now empty except for a few reporters and their fixers.

On a cement wall at a corner on Haji Baba Road, the red sign of the Khushal school carried the school crest—a blue-and-white shield with Muhammad’s words in Arabic: oh, my lord, equip me with more knowledge—as well as the Pashto phrase learning is light. Inside, beneath a portrait of Sir Isaac Newton, some of the girls would remove their headscarves and throw their backpacks on benches. Zahra Jilani, a young American working at a local NGO, recalled walking into the school for the first time: “I heard all this laughter, and girls running in the halls.” She told Malala and her class on one visit, “Girls, you must speak up for what you believe.” Malala asked her, “What is it like in America? Tell us!” The question was hardly casual. Malala had spent years observing her teachers shrouding themselves in burkas to shop at the bazaar, as if they were living under the Taliban in the 1990s. In Islamabad many young women went to work without even scarves.

Down the alley from the school, Malala lived in a concrete house with a garden. Small rooms opened off a central hall, and Malala kept her royal-blue school uniform on a hook near her bed. At night, her father often read the poetry of Rumi to her and her two younger brothers. Yousafzai was himself a poet, and recitation had played a large part in his education. “I have the right of education. I have the right to play. I have the right to sing I have the right to speak up,” Malala would later tell CNN. As a young teenager, she was reading Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist and watching her favorite show, My Dream Boy Will Come to Marry Me, on Star Plus TV—until the Taliban cut all cable to the valley.

The Khushal school was an oasis of enlightenment, a tiny dot in a surrounding theater of war, where classes were taught in English. The city of 180,000 had 200 schools for girls. The curriculum at the Khushal included English, Pashto, Urdu, physics, biology, math, and Islamic studies, imposed by General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, the religious fanatic who seized power in a 1977 coup and later declared Islamic law.

Mingora has long been dominated by tribal culture dictated by the vast number of Pashtun inhabitants, whose religion and tradition braided together. For outsiders, one of the most difficult aspects of the culture to understand was Pashtunwali, a personal code that stamps every aspect of Pashtun life, including morality, hospitality, independence, and revenge. Pakistan’s Pashtuns were closely connected to Afghanistan’s, making the frontier a staging area for the military and the ISI well before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, in 1979. In recent times, the Pashtuns have been divided between extremists and pro-democracy nationalists who push for greater autonomy. It was commonly known that the army’s and ISI’s links to jihadist groups such as the Taliban ran far deeper than was ever acknowledged. There were frequent explosions in the area, and power could be cut for days. The Taliban became a well-established presence in Swat. A decade earlier it had taken over the Mingora airport.

Arriving in Mingora in 2007, Ashraf quickly grasped the danger in the surrounding hills. “The most important district official refused to come on-camera,” he said. “ ‘Appearing on TV is not Islamic,’ he told me. This was the government representative.” The musicians who had made the city a tourist draw were now putting ads in the newspapers pledging to lead pious lives. Swat was a microcosm of the shifting loyalties in a dusty war for control of Pakistan among the military, the Islamists, and the progressives.

Everyone in Swat understood the significance of the name of Yousafzai’s school. As a young man, Yousafzai had learned to be a passionate nationalist in part by reciting the verse of Khushal Khan Khattak, the 17th-century Pashtun warrior-poet known for his courage against the conquering Moguls. The man to see in Mingora, Yousafzai served on the city’s Qaumi Jirga, or assembly of elders, and fought a constant battle with the army and the local authorities over the woeful conditions in the city—power outages, unclean water, unsanitary clinics, inadequate education facilities. Funds for textbooks took months to arrive and were often stolen by bureaucrats. The vast gulf between Pakistan’s cities and its rural areas was a travesty; FATA and Swat were ruled by Draconian laws based on tribal practice and a code that dated back to the colonial era. Yousafzai wrapped himself in optimism, convinced that he could make a difference in the city by applying the principles of peaceful dissent promoted by the 20th-century Pashtun leader Abdul Ghaffar (Badshah) Khan, known as “the Frontier Gandhi,” who also fought for the establishment of an autonomous nation—Pashtunistan.

“I used to warn him, ‘Ziauddin, be careful. There are people out to get you.’ He never listened,” said the author Aqeel Yousafzai, a war reporter based in Peshawar. Ziauddin named Malala after Malalai, the Afghan Joan of Arc, who died in battle, carrying ammunition to the freedom fighters at war with the British in 1880.

As a teenager, Ziauddin had experienced the changes when Swat became the training ground for jihadists on their way to fight in Afghanistan. His favorite teacher tried to persuade him to join the crusade. “I had nightmares all through those years,” he said recently. “I loved my teacher, but he tried to brainwash me.” Education saved him, and he determined to spend his life trying to improve schools for children, especially girls. A man with a desperate mission, he would drive every few weeks to Peshawar to alert the media to the increasing danger in his area, and he sent reporters there e-mails describing the failure of the army to keep order and the anarchy created by a new Taliban squad on the edge of Mingora. The Taliban presence in Swat, he told the writer Shaheen Buneri, “was not possible without the tacit support of the government and Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. Both view militant organizations as strategic assets.”

‘Are you an actress or a circus performer?” the tutor to the young Prince of Swat asked Life photographer Margaret Bourke-White when she visited the principality in 1947. No one in Swat, Bourke-White noted in her book Halfway to Freedom, had ever seen a woman in slacks. For years Swat was a British princely state, under the rule of an appointed regent, the Wali of Swat. The bearded wali, whom Bourke-White photographed, ruled his feudal land of 500,000 subjects with a few telephones connecting his fortresses. But his son, the prince, was determined to bring the outside world into Swat.

The wali had been known for his English suits and his rose garden. In 1961, Queen Elizabeth II visited the enchanted Brigadoon and praised it as “the Switzerland of the British Empire.” Each morning the new wali toured his principality—about the size of Delaware—to see how he could help his subjects. Passionate about education, the wali built tuition-free colleges, which every child could attend. Swat became a province of Pakistan in 1969, and its universities turned out many freethinkers, including Ziauddin Yousafzai, who was the president of the Pashtun Student Federation.

“Right from the beginning, Malala was my pet,” Yousafzai told me. “She was always in the school and always very curious.”

“They went everywhere together. Ziauddin loves all children too much. And no one more than Malala,” said Maryam Khalique, the principal of Khushal school, who lived next door to the family. Ziauddin teased his young sons by calling them “those naughty little boys,” but his daughter was special. For the first years of Malala’s life, the family lived in a two-room apartment in the school. She had the run of all the classrooms. “She would sit in the classes when she was only three, listening, her eyes sparkling,” Khalique said. “A little girl taking in the lessons of the older children.”

Malala’s mother was traditional and chose to remain in purdah, but in private she backed Malala’s independence, friends say. Later, in front of reporters, Malala would listen quietly when her father was chided for not allowing her mother the freedom he encouraged in his students. Ziauddin once asked Zebu Jilani, a granddaughter of the last wali and founder of the Swat Relief Initiative, who lives in Princeton, New Jersey, to speak to his Jirga. “Five hundred men and I, the only woman? And an American woman at that?” she asked him. Ziauddin obliged her by taking his wife, completely covered. As a child, Malala could go anywhere as long as she was escorted by a male relative, usually her father. She would even sit by his side when he met in the house with the Jirga.

“He encouraged Malala to speak freely and learn everything she could,” one teacher told me. She wrote long compositions in perfect penmanship. By the fifth grade she was winning debating contests. Urdu poetry was part of the curriculum, and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the revolutionary poet and former editor of the Pakistan Times, was a favorite writer: “We shall witness [the day] that has been promised when … the enormous mountains of tyranny blow away like cotton.” Khalique had one strict rule for her students: no shortwave radio from the two channels that broadcast Maulana Fazlullah, the shock jock who had declared himself the leader of the Swat Taliban.

The Rising Terror

‘We need to fight against America! We need to stop the NATO forces. They are infidels!” In the autumn of 2007, the big get for Peshawar’s TV journalists was the hard-line radio mullah who was terrorizing the Swat Valley. Fazlullah’s emblematic white horse grazed outside his compound. One of Ashraf’s first assignments for Dawn TV was to get Fazlullah on-camera. Why, Ashraf wondered, would anyone take seriously a fat killer who had dropped out of his madrassa and for a time run the local chairlift? In the villages, Taliban squads with Kalashnikovs stood by cots covered with gold jewelry that Fazlullah’s followers had been exhorted to donate for his cause. “Turn off your TV,” he told his listeners. “Shows like Dallas are the instruments of the Great Satan.” Ziauddin said of him, “He was not a sane person. He was against polio vaccinations. He burned TVs and cassettes A crazy madman. And one has to speak out against that.” At first, “Maulana Radio” was considered a joke, a Talib cartoon with gaps between his teeth. Shortwave and battery-operated radio was crucial in rural Pakistan, where few could read and there was hardly any electricity. Fazlullah hijacked two FM channels for his twice-daily broadcasts, and he threatened to kill anyone who tried to compete on the area’s 40 stations. For Swatis, Fazlullah’s harangues became a favorite entertainment. Pakistan’s think tanks warned of “Talibanization” in rural areas, but mullahs such as Fazlullah were perceived as Robin Hoods, who promised to fight the endless corruption and decrepit infrastructure of the frontier.

There was only one public, dial-up computer in Mingora. Every day Ashraf struggled to get online, trudging through Green Square, where Fazlullah’s thugs would dump the bodies of apostates they had flogged. Crowds would gather at Fazlullah’s mosque to witness the floggings. “The government says we shouldn’t do things like this public punishment, but we don’t follow their orders. We follow the orders of Allah!,” Fazlullah screamed into his P.A. system. New Yorker writer Nicholas Schmidle, as a young visiting scholar, was able to penetrate the area with a fixer. He saw men on roofs with rocket launchers, scanning the rice paddies and poplar fields for anyone who opposed them. “Are you ready for an Islamic system? Are you prepared to make the sacrifices?,” Fazlullah would yell. “Allahu Akbar! [Allah is the greatest!]” the crowd responded, raising their fists in the air.

It could take Ashraf four hours to transmit 28 seconds of film when the computer was able to connect, but there were days with no power. By the summer of 2007, women had been told not to leave their houses. There were rumors that a revered dancer had been found dead in the town square. “I had the story more or less to myself,” Ashraf said, but no one paid much attention. A news editor in Islamabad said, “Why is no one else reporting this?”

By November 2007 they were. Islamabad’s Red Mosque was in ruins, badly damaged in July, when the government sent troops to clean out hundreds of extremists. The mosque was a few blocks from the ISI headquarters, a symbol to many of how complex the political alliances were. Soon Fazlullah declared an all-out war on Swat. The first target was a girls’ school in a town 20 minutes from the Khushal school. The explosions occurred at night, when there were no children in school, for Pashtuns believe that children must never be harmed in an act of revenge.

In December 2007 former prime minister Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan to seek re-election, and millions turned out to greet her. In one of her last interviews Bhutto said that al-Qaeda could be “marching on Islamabad in two to four years.” In late December she was assassinated by terrorists, and the country erupted. There were more than 500 attacks in a two-year period, aimed at politicians, reporters, hotels, mosques, and civilians.

Soon terror chiefs were living openly in Lahore. In Mingora, girls whose schools had been destroyed now attended the Khushal school. Government schools were not an option. The monthly budget of two dollars per student that Pakistan allots “could not cover the community schools in the poorest areas, not even in the refugee camps,” said the author Fatima Bhutto, a niece of Benazir Bhutto. “Teachers were political appointees chosen for their loyalty to the ruling party.” Rarely shielded from seeing the injured and the dead, Malala learned to navigate in a war zone, taking on her father’s determination to change the lives of Swatis.

All that year, terror came to Mingora. By December 2008, helicopters and tanks scoured the area, but 10,000 army troops could not take out Fazlullah’s 3,000 guerrillas. One third of the city fled. “The rich have moved out of Swat, while the poor have no place but to stay here,” Malala later wrote. She dreaded Fridays, “when suicide attackers think that killing has special meaning.” Reporters struggled to persuade people to talk on the record, and Ziauddin always would. “There was never any sign of fear,” my colleague Pir Zubair Shah, who then worked for The New York Times, recalled. Shah, who is from a prominent Pashtun family, knew where to get a true sense of what was transpiring. “I would come to see Ziauddin, and Malala would serve us tea,” he said.

The Right Girl

‘Would you consider hiring on for a month or so to work with the video journalist Adam Ellick?,” New York Times documentary producer David Rummel e-mailed Ashraf in December, after meeting him in Peshawar. Ellick had reported from Prague, Indonesia, and Afghanistan, and was now producing short videos that took viewers inside a compelling personal story. Flying into Islamabad from Kabul, Ellick had the bushy beard of a Talib, but he had little if any experience in Pakistan. He could appear oblivious to tribal codes and brisk to Ashraf when the reporter went through the elaborate greetings dictated by Pashtunwali. “I was used to being called ‘sir’ by my students,” Ashraf told me, “and suddenly someone younger would say to me, ‘Focus on your work. When we work, we work. Why are you shaking hands all the time?’ ”

Working with Ellick was a big break for Ashraf. In graduate school, Ashraf had written his thesis on how Pakistan was perceived in The New York Times. For hours, the two would sit together as Ellick coached him on editing and interviewing techniques. It was a dangerous time for reporters in Pakistan. Working on the links between Taliban extremists and the army, New York Times reporter Carlotta Gall was attacked in her hotel room in Quetta by ISI agents, who took her computer, notebooks, and cell phone. Pir Shah was held by Talib commanders for three days in FATA. Aqeel Yousafzai was almost killed in a Taliban camp outside Peshawar. Brutally beaten, he lost half his teeth before he was rescued. As conditions in FATA grew worse, Dawn’s bureau chief had Ashraf focus completely on Mingora.

The tipping point there came in January 2009 when a dancer named Shabana was murdered, her bullet-ridden body left on display in Green Square. Malala saw it all. “They cannot stop me,” she would later say on-camera. “I will get my education, if it is home, school, or any place. This is our request to all the world. Save our schools. Save our world. Save our Pakistan. Save our Swat.” The English teacher at the school, before announcing that he was leaving, asked Ashraf, “How can I teach these children Keats and Shelley when such things are happening three blocks from our school?” Over the next six months, a million refugees would flee. Then Fazlullah decreed that, as of January 15, all of the girls’ schools in Swat would be closed.

Ashraf saw this as a call to action. “I went to Adam Ellick and I convinced him this is what we should launch as part of the video forum. Education is the most important issue to me, not militancy. I met him in Islamabad, and he said, ‘Go for it.’ Adam asked, ‘Who could be the protagonist who could carry this story?’ ” Ashraf suggested Malala. “When Adam said yes, I went to Ziauddin and said, ‘We can launch this issue in a global forum.’ ” Did it occur to him, I asked, that Malala could be in danger? “Of course not,” he said. “She was a child. Who would shoot a child? The Pashtun tradition is that all children are spared from harm.”

As a fixer, Ashraf had often been fearful of putting foreign reporters in danger. Now he no longer considered himself just a reporter, but a partisan. Along with his closest friend, the BBC’s Abdul Hai Kakar, he was part of a secret resistance operation with Ziauddin and several others. “We would write and report from Fazlullah’s camp half the day and try to stop him the other half of the day,” Ashraf said. He compared their situation to that of the French Resistance. “I was undercover 15 days of the month. I would tell everyone in Mingora I was leaving for Peshawar, but I would stay, trying to gather information about what was going on.” He and Kakar developed good relations with Fazlullah’s deputies and frequently interviewed the cocky mullah himself, who hoped to use the reporters for propaganda. “Fazlullah, your ambitions will do you in,” Kakar warned him. “They will riot in Islamabad if you try to stop the schools.” By then Malala and her cousins had been forbidden to leave their house, a four-minute walk from school.

‘I’m looking for a girl who could bring the human side to this catastrophe. We would hide her identity,” Kakar told Ashraf. “An Anne Frank?,” Ashraf answered, going on to explain the power of the girl in Amsterdam who became an icon through her diary. Meanwhile, Kakar and Ashraf got many queries from French and English news organizations, asking if they knew fixers who could get into the region.

In New York, Dave Rummel saw how powerful a story on the closing of the Swat schools could be. He knew Pakistan well, however, so he was concerned about safety in an area controlled by the Taliban. From Islamabad, Ellick e-mailed Ashraf:

We need a main character family to follow on both the final days of school (jan 14–15) and again on the possible new days of school (jan 31-feb 2) We want it to play out like film, where we don’t know the ending That is narrative journalism. And most of all, the family and daughters should be expressive and have strong personalities and emotions on the issue. They must care! … Remember, as we discussed several times on Monday, safety first. Don’t take any risks. … If you have fear, that is ok. Simply stop reporting.

Ashraf read the e-mail many times and kept coming back to the term “narrative journalism.” He told me, “I had no idea what it meant.” But he had exactly the family in mind he believed would cooperate.

Narrative journalism is almost unknown in India and Pakistan, where stories are told mostly through facts and critical analysis. The intimate narrative—its requirements of real-life emotions and private moments—could be considered a violation in a very traditional area, and for a Pashtun, schooled in hospitality, it would be incomprehensible that such a sensitive line would be crossed. The complexities of personality are considered the work of novelists.

“If this is O.K. with Ziauddin, let’s do it,” Ellick told him. Ashraf said, “I had to convince Ziauddin. I told him it was important for both of us—and for our cause.” Ziauddin rushed to Peshawar with Malala to discuss the idea, since it was too dangerous for foreign reporters to enter Mingora. Ashraf would be the co-producer and make every decision in Mingora.

Ashraf told me, “Ziauddin was very reluctant. He thought it was going to be about all of the schools in Mingora. I kept telling him in Pashto, ‘Don’t worry about the security.’ This was criminal on my part.” At their meeting, Ellick pressed Ziauddin about the danger involved, but no one had to tell a Pashtun about danger. “I will give up my life for Swat,” he told Ashraf on-camera. “Fortunately or unfortunately, Malala answered questions very quickly,” Ziauddin later said. At one point, Malala answered in perfect English, “The Taliban are trying to close our schools.”

“I was opposed,” said Ziauddin. “I did not want to impose my liberalism on my daughter, but a close friend said, ‘This documentary will do more for Swat than you could do in 100 years.’ I could not imagine the bad consequences.” Later, under an assumed name, Malala would give a speech, “How the Taliban Is Trying to Stop Education,” that was reported in the Urdu press. Inside the Times there was tremendous concern about the risk. “All of the editors were pulled in,” said Rummel. They finally agreed that—given the urgency of the situation—Ziauddin’s role as an activist made the risk one they could take.

What Ashraf didn’t know was that Ziauddin had already decided on his own to reach out to the international media. “Would you consider allowing one of your students to blog about this order [to close the schools]?,” Abdul Kakar had asked him a few weeks earlier. “The BBC needs to broadcast this to the world.” No parent that Ziauddin approached was willing to take part, however. “Would you consider allowing my daughter?,” Ziauddin finally asked. “She’s young, but she can do it.” To protect her identity, Kakar chose the name Gul Makai, the heroine of a Pashto folktale. Her conversations with Kakar would be brief—only a few minutes, just time enough for him to take down a paragraph or two.

Kakar always called her on a special line that would be difficult to trace. “I would start off with her in Pashto. ‘Are you ready? Let’s start.’ ” Then they would switch to Urdu. Later, there would be accusations that Kakar had coached her. “They ran unedited,” he told me.

On January 3, Malala posted, “On my way from school to home, I heard a man saying ‘I will kill you.’ I hastened my pace and after a while I looked back [to see] if the man was still coming behind me. But to my utter relief he was talking on his mobile.” There would be 35 entries in all, the last on March 4. Malala was cautious, but in one entry, she criticized the army: “It seems that it is only when dozens of schools have been destroyed and hundreds [of] others closed down that the army thinks about protecting them. Had they conducted their operations here properly, this situation would not have arisen.” In one entry she almost tipped her hand: “My mother liked my pen name Gul Makai and said to my father ‘why not change her name to Gul Makai?’ … I also like the name, because my real name means ‘grief stricken.’ My father said that some days ago someone brought the printout of this diary, saying how wonderful it was. My father said that he smiled but could not even say it was written by his daughter.”

The Last Day of School

Ashraf drove to Mingora in the middle of the night with his cameraman. He had 24 hours to get in and out of the city. “To be seen with a camera was an invitation to be killed,” he told me. Coming over the mountains in the darkness, Ashraf heard the muezzins’ call to prayer. “I had a sense of disaster,” he said. Just before dawn, as he approached the city, Ashraf called Yousafzai. “It is too early,” Ziauddin said. “I was not expecting you.” He told Ashraf that Malala’s uncle was staying with them, and he was strongly opposed to having journalists present on this last day of school. There was no mention of Malala’s blog. Ashraf was completely unaware of the calls she had made with Kakar. “I told no one,” Kakar later said.

It was clear to Ashraf, however, that something had happened to frighten Yousafzai. “He was clearly upset. He did not want me there.” From a friend’s house, just before dawn, Ashraf called Ellick. “Adam said, ‘Shoot everything from the moment Malala gets up and has her breakfast to every moment of her last day at school.’ Nothing was to be left out.” Ashraf told him, “Ziauddin is reluctant.” Ellick said, “But he has promised us.” Ashraf was suddenly caught in a dilemma: upset his close friend or fail. “I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “I decided I must try to convince him directly.”

Terrified that he might be stopped by soldiers, he hurried to Yousafzai’s house. “What are you doing here?,” Yousafzai said, clearly angry that Ashraf was putting his family in danger. “It was criminal on my part,” Ashraf said later. “I talked to him about the danger we were in, and that this was the moment he could alert the world. I explained that we needed to stay with Malala all day, shooting her, and Ziauddin said, ‘What!’ ” It was clear he had never understood that Malala would be the star of the video. “I was in a panic,” Ashraf told me. “He said, ‘I thought it would be only about all the other schools.’ I said, ‘No, to make this important, we need to follow Malala and you the entire day.’ ”

Ashraf now believes that the code of Pashtunwali made it impossible for Yousafzai to refuse. A worried father, he was also driven by nanawatai, the obligation to give shelter. When Malala woke up, Ashraf and the cameraman were in her bedroom, setting up for a shot. Outside the window was the sound of shelling. “Malala did not understand what we were doing there,” Ashraf said. “She was shy. I had to say to her, ‘Malala, imagine this is your last day of school.’ It was her last day, but we had to work with her. Trying to brush her teeth, she kept looking at us. I said, ‘Be natural. Don’t look at the camera. Pretend we are not here.’ It took her hours to understand. We helped to mold her into a part—a part she very much believed.”

Ashraf’s voice broke as he described to me the rush of adrenaline that came over him as they struggled to get every shot. Half the classes at the school were empty, and there were nearby explosions all day. For hours, the camera stayed on Malala and her father, who sat in his office calling parents who had pulled their children out. “Pay us some of your dues,” he said.

“Ziauddin was adamant. He did not want us taking pictures of the girls at school. Soon he said, ‘Enough. You must leave.’ ” But after Ziauddin left the school, Ashraf continued to film in the courtyard, where one scene would jump out at viewers. Wearing headscarves, eight girls line up, and one with a veiled face reads her essay directly into the camera, demanding, “Why the peace and innocent people of the valley are targeted?” Ashraf recalled with emotion, “I arranged that. I grouped them in the courtyard and said, ‘Girls, tell me how you feel about your school.’ ” What guided him, he said, was his trust in Islam: “Children are never attacked. They are sacred.”

Watching “Class Dismissed,” the 13-minute video, a viewer is struck by the raw power of Malala, timidly determined to express her deeply held beliefs, which would be very simple if she lived in the middle-class world of Lahore, or Karachi, or New York. At one point she declares, “I want to become a doctor. It’s my own dream. But my father told me that ‘you have to become a politician.’ But I don’t like politics.” Ashraf would later have to deal with a question that plagues all journalists: What are the consequences of exposure? He would also have to ask himself a corollary question: What would have been the implications of deciding not to expose the horrors of Mingora? Ashraf still blames himself for teasing her strong beliefs out of a child who would be seen as an exemplary agent for change in one world and as a danger that had to be stopped in another.

All through February, Malala continued to blog. She reported on the peace negotiations as the army capitulated and signed off on turning Swat over to strict Islamic law. Britain and some other countries immediately protested; the United States did not. The Taliban seemed to be appeased, but they continued to kidnap government officials and assassinate reporters.

“In a valley where people do not even hear the voice of a girl, a girl comes forward and speaks a language that the local people cannot even think of. She writes diaries for the BBC, she speaks up in front of diplomats, on television, and her class follows,” said Jehangir Khattak, the former news editor of Peshawar’s Frontier Post. “Ziauddin allowed his daughter to rise in a society where she was seeing dead bodies every day. She didn’t hear about the threat—she lived it. In a closed society, she did not mince words.”

Going Public

‘You are right now in a car going into a city where you are a wanted man,” Ellick says off-camera in a second New York Times Web video, “A Schoolgirl’s Odyssey,” which is 20 minutes long. Six months had passed since the Taliban moved into Swat. The Yousafzais had fled, along with 1.5 million other refugees from the area. As many as one million moved into camps, where often the only relief organizations providing food were religious Islamic groups with ties to the Taliban, who delivered it with invective about foreign enemies. “There was no sign of the army or the police,” Ziauddin told Ellick. Malala and her mother went to stay with relatives. Ziauddin, in Peshawar, moved in with three close friends from the Jirga. For months Mingora was under siege. And still the army could not—or would not—put the resources into annihilating the Taliban. That spring of 2009, Mingora became a ghost town as the Taliban advanced on nearby Buner, only 100 miles from the capital. Finally the army sent more troops, backed by helicopters and rockets, to the area.

In the video, Malala and her father return to the school and find total devastation. Discovering a message left in a student’s composition book, Malala says, “They have written something.” Then she reads, “I am proud to be a Pakistani and a soldier of the Pakistani Army.” Looking angrily at the camera, she says, “He doesn’t know the spelling of ‘soldier.’ ” They find a letter intended for Ziauddin: “We have lost so much dear and precious lives of our soldiers. And this is all due to your negligence.” Looking at a hole blasted in one wall, Malala says, “The Taliban destroyed us.”

Later in the video, Malala and her father meet the late Richard Holbrooke, America’s special envoy, in Pakistan to inspect the refugee camps. Holbrooke seems surprised by the tone the girl takes with him. “If you can help us in our education, please help us,” Malala tells him. “Your country faces a lot of problems,” Holbrooke replies. Later, Urdu bloggers would use this footage against her as proof that she was “a Zionist agent” and “a C.I.A. spy.”

“I was sick when I saw the video for the first time,” Ashraf told me. “In New York, the editors had added footage of Taliban floggings.” Now convinced that Malala was a possible target, he e-mailed Ellick that he was alarmed. “I was thinking we were making a commodity out of this small and graceful shining little girl. This conflict should not have been fought by Malala—it should have been fought by my army, my military, my police. This should not have been Malala’s job. That was a camouflage! This was an excuse for us to focus on Malala—not on the forces behind Malala, who were doing little to help the people of Mingora.”

Fazlullah had fled to Afghanistan, but his troops remained in the hills. Interviewing in the refugee camps, Pir Shah and New York Times bureau chief Jane Perlez heard reports that the army was kidnapping and killing anyone thought to be an extremist. Footage of suspected army assassinations came to them and ran in the Times. Soon Perlez’s visa was not renewed, and Shah, threatened by the ISI, left Pakistan.

Malala now spoke much more openly. In August, she appeared on Geo TV star anchor Hamid Mir’s news show. She talked about the two years her city had been under constant shelling. “What would you like to be?,” Mir asked her. “I would like to be a politician. Our country is full of crisis. Our politicians are lazy. I would like to remove the prevalent laziness and serve the nation.”

As Pakistan imploded, Ellick filed story after story from Karachi and Islamabad. “At dinners and over tea, I would tell my urban middle-upper class friends about what I had witnessed in Swat—and about Malala,” he posted on Facebook. “I could not get anyone to care. They looked at me like I had a contagious disease—as if I was describing an atrocity in a village in Surinam.” In 2010, one year after making his film, he returned there during a period of devastating floods. “I found hundreds and hundreds of kids that were furious at the fact that their schools had not been rebuilt and they openly said to me, ‘You know our government is corrupt.’ ”

It had become an open secret that Malala was the blogger known as Gul Makai. “I am going to apply Malala for the International Children’s Peace Prize,” Ziauddin told Kakar, referring to the annual awards of the KidsRights Foundation, in Amsterdam. Later, Kakar told him, “Do not chase after fame. Malala is already known and could go abroad to study.” He explained, “I was worried they [reporters] would ask Malala a question: ‘What would you do if the Taliban comes?’ She would not know what to say. This question is not about education. Instead she would tell them, ‘Listen to me, the Taliban is very bad.’ ”

As Malala increased her TV appearances, Pakistan’s relationship with the United States deteriorated severely. In 2011, C.I.A. agent Raymond Davis was arrested and later released in Lahore, Osama bin Laden was assassinated, Pakistan cut NATO supply lines after an accidental bombing killed soldiers on the border, and drone strikes resulted in a large number of civilian casualties.

When Malala appeared on the talk show A Morning with Farah, she was dressed modestly in a pastel tunic and headscarf. Farah Hussain, glamorous in a black shalwar kameez and high heels, could hardly disguise her condescension. “Your Urdu is so perfect,” she told Malala, and then brought up the Taliban. Malala said, “If a Talib is coming, I will pull off my sandal and slap him on his face.” For a country girl of 14, she was approaching a dangerous line.

Ziauddin and Malala often received threats, and rocks were thrown over the walls of the school and their house. The government offered protection, but Ziauddin turned it down, saying, “We cannot have normalcy in our classes if there are guns.” Malala used the consolation-prize money she had received from her own government to buy a school bus. In June the threats continued: “Malala is an obscenity.” “You are befriending the kaffir [infidels].”

In May, the local newspaper, Zama Swat, reported the killings of numerous prisoners under mysterious circumstances while they were in police custody. For months, the menace from the army had gone unreported—the looting of forests by army patrols, assassinations without trials, local people roughed up at checkpoints.

With the end of the school year, the Sufi dance festival resumed and field flowers covered the hills. Each year Yousafzai arranged a school picnic at the waterfall in Marghazar, 30 minutes away. Days later someone dropped a note over the wall: “You are giving our girls loose morals and spreading vulgarity by taking the girls to the picnic spot where they run around without purdah.”

In June the owner of the Swat Continental Hotel, in Mingora, an outspoken critic of the army’s failure to root out the extremists, was gunned down in the street. Then Zahid Khan, the head of the hotel association, was attacked on the way home from his mosque. “I wanted an inquiry,” he told me. “Why were these Taliban not attacking anyone in the army? No one was arrested.” The Jirga reacted by announcing that its members would not take part in the Independence Day celebration on August 14, when the military would demonstrate its presence in Swat. Immediately they were summoned to the base to have tea with the brigadier, which one member saw as a chilling threat. They decided not to accept the invitation, but Yousafzai persuaded them to negotiate. He later told a friend, “The meeting was a success. I cannot take on the Pakistani Army.”

“Ziauddin, you are on a list to be killed,” Aqeel Yousafzai told him in September. “You must stop allowing Malala to speak out in public. Or leave the country.” Close friends had already advised Ziauddin to leave and get a scholarship somewhere for Malala. “I came early in the morning,” Aqeel told me. “Malala was asleep. Ziauddin awakened her, and she came and joined us. ‘Your uncle Aqeel thinks we are in a lot of danger,’ he said. ‘He thinks you should leave.’ Malala looked at me and said, ‘My uncle is a very good man, but what he is suggesting does not fit with the code of bravery.’ ”

“They want to silence every critic,” said former presidential media adviser Faranahz Ispahani, the wife of former ambassador Husain Haqqani, who was once the target of a trumped-up smear. “So how do they do it? They silence dissident voices, whether it is Benazir Bhutto, [Punjab governor] Salman Taseer, or Malala. With my husband, they called him a traitor. Ziauddin would not shut up, so they put a bullet into his daughter. They did not expect that all of us Pakistanis have reached a point where pluralistic progressive Pakistan is standing up and saying, ‘No more.’ ”

The Attack

On October 9 last year, Ziauddin was at the press club, speaking out against the local government, which was trying to impose control over private schools. “Hold my phone,” he told his friend Ahmed Shah. Shah saw the number of the Khushal school on an incoming call, and Ziauddin indicated for him to answer it. The caller said, “Someone has attacked the bus. Come quickly.” Shah told me, “We rushed to the clinic. Yousafzai said, ‘It could be that someone has come after Malala.’ The first sight of her there was blood coming out of her mouth. She was weeping. Then she passed out.”

One officer described the shooter as a teenager with shaking hands, but the story changed constantly. A few moments after the bus left the school, the girls started singing. Someone in the road who looked friendly waved for the bus to stop, then asked, “Which one of you is Malala?” No one saw a gun in his hand. They looked toward their friend. Then the assassin put a bullet in Malala’s head, and perhaps his unsteadiness saved her life. The bullet only grazed her skull, but it damaged the soft tissue underneath, which controls the face and neck. Two other girls were also badly injured.

“Look at this map,” Aqeel Yousafzai told me in New York as he drew a diagram. “The checkpoint was a four-minute walk away. The driver screamed for help. No one came. Twenty minutes passed. No one came. Finally they had to rush from the school with the police. Why? Many people believe the military is responsible. The feeling is Malala and her father had to be silenced.”

The Tehrik-I-Taleban Party, Fazlullah’s umbrella group, took credit for the attack. By defying Pashtun tradition, Malala was “a clear sinner” who had violated Shari’a and “a spy who divulged secrets of the mujahideen and Taliban through BBC and in return received awards and rewards from the Zionists.” They accused her of wearing makeup in interviews. In a seven-page statement, they announced that Ziauddin would be next. Reports in the press mentioned Yousafzai’s desire for asylum.

Within hours of Malala’s attack, Ashraf received a phone call from Ellick: “Are we responsible?” Later, Ashraf recalled, Ellick consoled him, saying, “We did nothing wrong. If you feel you must write about it, you should. It could be a catharsis.” Ellick also e-mailed Ziauddin expressing his own sense of guilt, Yousafzai said. On WGBH, Boston’s public-television station, discussing the ethics of putting a child on-camera, Ellick said, “I’m part of a system that continuously gave them awards … which emboldened her … and made her more public, more brash, more outspoken.”

All over Pakistan, editorials demanded the obvious: Were the military’s ties to extremists more important than human rights? Shouldn’t the government guarantee a proper education for girls? Within 24 hours, General Kayani was in Peshawar.

Soon a curious counter-narrative began to grow in the Urdu press. Malala’s picture with Richard Holbrooke was widely distributed. Yousafzai, who had always spoken openly with reporters, was suddenly incommunicado. In Mingora, posters were distributed with the headline: who is the bigger enemy, the u.s. or the taliban? The bullet in Malala’s cranium had become a political instrument. At the hospital one doctor said, “We do not know if we can save her, but we think that if she lives she will be completely paralyzed.” Ziauddin said, “My God, who could do this to a child?” He was in shock as the Peshawar hospital filled with dignitaries, including Interior Minister Rehman Malik. When Ziauddin finally appeared before the press, Malik was by his side. Ziauddin said he would not be seeking asylum, and he thanked General Kayani.

“I was not thinking about what general or what president I was in a great trauma,” Ziauddin said. He was now dependent on the very establishment he had spent years criticizing. When he was finally allowed to fly to Birmingham, the hospital there arranged for a press conference. But Yousafzai took no questions.

In the last decade, 36,000 people have been killed in Pakistan, and the situation seems to worsen every week. In Birmingham, Ziauddin Yousafzai monitors the news from Pakistan as Malala recovers from two more delicate operations to replace part of her skull with a titanium plate. She plans to write a memoir. For Vital Voices, the women’s organization that has raised $150,000 for the Malala Fund, she announced in a widely distributed video, “I want to serve. I want to serve the people. I want every child to be educated. For that reason we have organized the Malala Fund.” Publishers have offered more than $2 million for the rights to her book. “I will not allow Malala’s story to be used for someone’s agenda I love Pakistan, and I loved my land before it was Pakistan,” Ziauddin said.

Hamid Mir, who almost lost his life when he discovered a bomb under his car before it exploded, said, “Malala called me. She spoke very softly. She said I must not lose courage. I must fight.” She also called Geo TV reporter Mahboob Ali in Mingora, the day Fazlullah’s forces blew up a nearby mosque, where 22 were killed. “Please do not let them put anyone in danger,” she said. “I don’t want my name to cause harm.” Meanwhile, in Mingora, the government renamed a school after Malala. Within a short time it was attacked.

In a phone conversation Ali had a day before Malala’s video was launched, he said that Ziauddin seemed resigned to a life that was no longer his to control. He told Ali, “You are a person who can go from one place to another in our town. And I cannot now. Sometimes I become very desperate. I feel I should go back to Pakistan and be in my own village and my own state.” Later he added, “This is a fourth life for me. I did not choose it. This is a great country with great values, but when you are taken from your own land, you even miss the bad people of your area.”

In January, the Jirga demanded a full judicial commission to investigate “the mayhem that has occurred in Swat and is still happening”—an obvious reference to the military involvement, insiders say.

Not long after I spoke briefly with Yousafzai on the phone, it was announced that he was going to work as a global-education consultant for the Pakistan High Commission in Birmingham. Malala will remain in England, recovering from the damage caused to her speech and hearing. Her left jaw and facial nerves have been reconstructed. A cochlear implant will lessen the deafness in her left ear. Pakistan recently announced that, by the end of 2015, girls’ education will be a compulsory legal right.

In February, Malala was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. If she recovers, she has been primed to campaign, as Benazir Bhutto once did, against all religious extremism. “That little girl stood up and was not deterred,” said Faranahz Ispahani. “She paid a terrible price, but the price she paid may have awoken the world in a way that nothing else has.”